ORIENT, Ohio — Willie Harris puts the nail polish down. He measures a pink box against wrapping paper with dinosaurs wearing Santa hats. Then, he rips the paper with his hands.
"Scissors around here are scarce," Harris said.
He pulls one side of the paper over to the other, but it won't connect. He laughs.
“I’m not too good with wrapping, but I’m doing my best,” Harris said.
The 51-year-old tells me he hasn’t wrapped a Christmas present in 22 years. Because that’s how long he’s been incarcerated.
See what Christmas in prison looks like in the video below:
“This is for my grandbaby,” Harris said.
He’s smiling, even though he’s standing inside the Pickaway Correctional Institution.
"They brought Christmas to us early," Harris said.
And eventually, someone brings him a pair of scissors. He begins wrapping a small karaoke machine next.
“She’s going to love this,” Harris said.
At a warehouse in Cincinnati’s West End, 98 miles away from the prison, a 5-year-old girl pushes boxes of paper plates across the floor. There is Christmas music playing, and she’s counting spoons.
These are the supplies Harris and other incarcerated people around the state will use at Christmas celebrations this month.
Standing next to a tub of wrapping paper, Jill Hartford tells me she started planning these events six months ago. Hartford is the chief operating officer of the Four-Seven, a group that works in prisons to help incarcerated people get ready for life outside.
“They’re not monsters,” Hartford said. “They’re really not very different from us. And I hope I’m not ever defined by my worst mistake, either.”
More than 18,000 people are released from Ohio prisons each year. And most of them are parents.
Research shows that a genuine connection between a parent and a child can help keep that child out of prison. So the re-entry organization uses donations to let people who are incarcerated pick out gifts for their kids.
Then, they ship those gifts to the institutions to be wrapped. They call these events Christmas miracles.
And this is the first year they’ve been in every prison in Ohio.
“It’s not about the gift,” Hartford said. “We’re just giving them a chance to make up for lost time.”
On Wednesday, the warden at Pickaway Correctional near Columbus grabs a maraca and dances with Harris’s granddaughter.
“I prepare myself — every time this happens — to cry. Because they can't be there with them on Christmas morning,” said Rochelle Moore, the warden there. “And we can break that generational curse by just reuniting the family and allowing them to be together.”
Before his family gets there, Harris sits by himself. He grew up in Cincinnati, and his daughter has spent more Christmas mornings without her dad than with him.
“It gives us hope,” Harris said of the event. “And it gives us faith that there will be better days after this.”
He takes a drink of water and watches other families walk in. Then, he smiles. And quickly stands up.
“Give me a hug,” Harris said.
His daughter and two grandchildren have arrived. First, they color. And then his granddaughter gets her face painted with a Christmas tree.
They both laugh.
"I'll never forget this," Harris said. "Days like this — they can last a lifetime."
